The Cottage on the Fells

They were standing on the pier at Boulogne, the Folkstone boat was just departing, the east wind was blowing, and over the cold, early spring day the clouds drifted, grey as the cygnet’s feather.

Without wishing to paraphrase or parody a famous author, one may say that if one goes over to Boulogne and stands long enough on the pier, one will meet, most possibly, someone one knows—probably one’s tailor.

Hellier had come over to Boulogne a fortnight ago to recruit from an attack of influenza; he was a briefless barrister, with two hundred and fifty pounds a year of his own; his chambers were in Clifford’s Inn, and he had a taste for that side of life which lends itself to romantic literature.

The novels of Gaboriau, absorbed as a boy, had given him his first impetus towards the law.

There is no manner of doubt in the world that housebreaking is the most romantic of the professions; after housebreaking, the profession that helps the housebreaker to escape the law.

A great criminal lawyer, with his armful of briefs, was the pictured objective towards which Richard Hellier had set his face; he had been called to the Bar eighteen months now, and his only client up to this had been a dog thief (item, convicted).

“I suppose there are,” replied Comyns, “but there’s one thing I can, the gangway is going, so long—”

He dashed down the gangway, the hawsers were cast off, and the screw churned the steel grey waters of the harbour.

Hellier stood with his hands in his overcoat pockets, watching the boat as she passed from sight, and wishing that he was Comyns.

Comyns was handsome, Comyns was wealthy. His father made bicycle lamps and motor horns in Wolverhampton, his grandfather had been a platelayer. He belonged to one of those families that go up in the world. Hellier belonged to one of the families that go down. When Comyns’ grandfather had been laying plate, Hellier’s had been eating off it. But the plate of the Helliers’ had vanished as utterly as their past, and of all the story there remained a single punch ladle, a speechless, yet eloquent witness, to tell of the good times gone.

Hellier was a middle-sized man, and plain. Dark, clean-shaved, pre-eminently a gentleman. Just as a rose is a rose, or a pansy a pansy.

Let the handsome and superficial Comyns walk with him down the street, and out of a hundred and one women a hundred would have looked with appreciation on the motor horn merchant’s son, but the hundred and first would have looked with interest at Hellier.

He turned from contemplation of the harbour and came back down the pier slowly, breathing the keen east wind and wishing he was Comyns.

He was in love for the first time in his life, and he was taking it badly. He was only thirty-three years of age, yet he was already summing up his life, looking back at his past, telling himself that had he not fooled away his time in the by-ways of literature and stuck to the hard high road of life, he might now have been well-to-do, like Comyns.

It is only when a man is really in love that he sees the defects in himself and his position, sees them with a preternatural and startling vividness—if he is a man.

So Hellier wished he was Comyns, utterly ignorant of the fact that if some magician had converted him into the object of his admiration, the woman he loved would not have looked at him twice.